Celebrating 25 Years of the North Carolina Literary Review
on the play of light and shadow, on colors, especially Vermeer’s preference for blues and yellows, and the position of the assumed viewer of each painting’s vignette. His attention is on each painting’s nuances: the texture and folds of the subject’s linen cap in Woman Holding a Balance, the flow of light through the windows in Officer with Laughing Girl, the position of the handle on the pitcher in The Music Lesson, and the thickness of the instrument’s strings in The Guitar Player. Without the benefit of reproductions of the paintings, we must rely on White’s verbal acuity to capture and represent them to us, and he does so lovingly, attentively but not sentimentally. Indeed, his descriptions inspire us to see beyond the paintings and speculate about what lies outside of our view. White’s memoir, as the title implies, is about experiencing the Vermeers; his travels are to immerse himself in these paintings, not simply to see them; the
paintings – what they capture and what they present – are the destinations. Time is suspended while he is absorbed by the repeated motifs, figures, and colors of Vermeer’s art and the reactions they provoke: shock at the directness of the young woman’s gaze in Girl Interrupted in Her Music; unease at the implied threat in Officer with Laughing Girl. Moreover, these destinations are imbued with the power of healing – not unlike the healing and recovery that White experiences in his AA meetings and sponsorships. With each stage of his travels, White’s narrative reveals details of his own history that inform his particular responses to the paintings. When White describes the results of poor conservation of several Vermeer paintings, such as Woman with Lute or The Girl with a Pearl Earring, as highlighting “damages [that] can also be a testament to the power of the original version, the deepest source of beauty” (102), he could
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be commenting on his own fragile state which these paintings help him recognize and acknowledge. Furthermore, White acknowledges that he will not always need or want the experiences and reactions inspired by this year-long journey of (self) discovery, but from them, White emerges with two volumes – a book of poems titled Vermeer in Hell and this memoir – both of which capture the luminous beauty and mystery of Vermeer’s paintings as well as a deeper understanding of himself. White’s book has been described by one reviewer as “a sort of literary nesting doll”2 that surprises readers with its relatively ordinary story: a man coping with the end of a marriage and the emotional devastation that follows. However, it’s White’s honest, not hyped presentation that helps us understand his grief, how he responds to his grief, and how he transforms his grief through his pilgrimage to view Vermeer’s paintings that makes this an extraordinary story. n 2
Robert Siegel, “Enigmatic Interiors: On Love, Death, Divorce, and Michael White’s New Travels in Vermeer,” Los Angeles Review of Books 19 June 2015: web.
PHOTOGRAPH BY GRAHAM TERHUNE PHOTOGRAPHY
CLYDE EDGERTON RECEIVES THOMAS WOLFE PRIZE North Carolina native Clyde Edgerton has added the Thomas Wolfe Prize to his list of honors, which already includes the Lyndhurst Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and five notable book awards from the New York Times. Edgerton received his BA in English from UNC Chapel Hill and taught high school English for a time. He is the author of ten novels, three of which have been made into movies. Edgerton is currently the Thomas S. Kenan III professor of Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington. Read more about this award-winning writer in the two interviews with him in NCLR 2003 and in an interview forthcoming in 2017, in which George Hovis will talk with this multi-talented North Carolina writer about his music and painting, for the special feature section on North Carolina literature and the other arts. n ABOVE Clyde Edgerton giving his Wolfe Prize lecture, Chapel Hill, 6 Oct. 2015